Finally, Vogue 1247 is DONE!! Plus pumpkin update

Today was a planned vacay day, and then Princeton was closed anyway because of flooding.  And somehow my sewing mojo has been recovered.   So I finally finished Vogue 1247, the Rachel Comey skirt.
It's the one with the cute pockets, and as you can see, I kept the waistband.



As a reminder, here's the pattern:


Obviously, I added some inches to this pattern. After hemming, the skirt is 5.5 inches longer than the finished pattern length.

The shirt is from Ann Taylor Loft, in the clearance section.  It has a lot of plastic beads that keep falling off, lol.


When I sewed down the side seams yesterday to take this from a 14 to a 12, I didn't line up the side horizontal lines


I spent some time today so that horizontal line matches on BOTH sides .


Oh, and then here's some ugliness with the invisible zip.  The bottom of the zip is not so nice.  So I just removed the stitching there and had the zipper "end" earlier, thereby having a "tail" inside with the zip which makes it easier to finish.  Thanks to MushyWear for her recommendation to read SunnyGal Studio's tips on invisible zips.

Also, anon wanted to know how I sewed an invisible zip without an invisible zipper foot.  I ironed the teeth flat like all the directions told me to do and used my regular zipper foot and made sure to get right up in there against the teeth.  Which is easy to do til you get to the end of the zip.  Then I couldn't get in close to the teeth, so it looked like this at the bottom:

So now it looks like this (it's hanging off my ironing board, that's why it's folded kind of weird).  It's still a bit puckered and that's after ironing.  But the zipper part looks nice!


So this morning my other concern was the "hole" between the top of the zip and the waistband.

After installing the hook and eye, it wound up looking like this, so the hole isn't TOO big.


The hem was the other trial.  This fabric is from Jomar, purchased during PR weekend Philly.  It's some mystery blend fabric.  Definitely synthetic, with some stretch.  Hemming it was a nightmare.  I wanted an 1.5 inch hem.  I twin needle stitched it.   It created these "points" in the hem that looked horrible.  Then I ironed 3" of interfacing on and folded in half, twin needle stitched.  It started to pucker right away while the interfacing started to separate from the fabric.  Then I cut 1.5 inches off, then twin needle stitched with a half inch seam, and then folded over again and did another half inch.  Somehow the shape of the skirt is more pencil than A-line, but I'll take it!

In other news, the start of the baby pumpkin I showed you last week fell off this weekend and started to rot.


But here's a new baby pumpkin/female flower coming on.  I will be sure to watch this every day so that I can hand pollinate it when it blooms.  Carolyn wrote about the bees doing their job, but I want to make sure this pumpkin is fertilized!  I also got out my gardening gloves and pulled the vine back a bit so it's not on the grass anymore.  Pumpkin vines are very prickly!


So I hope everyone is healthy-healthy-healthy.  Be well!  I need to cook soon but would rather keep on sewing!